Exploring exotic states with twisted boundary conditions

The goal of this thesis is to develop methods to study the nature and properties of exotic hadrons from lattice simulations. The main focus lies in the application of twisted boundary conditions. The thesis consists of a general introduction and the collection of three papers, represented respectively in three chapters. The introduction of the thesis reviews the theoretical background, which is further used in the rest of the thesis. Further, in Chapter 1, implementing partially twisted boundary conditions in the scalar sector of lattice QCD is studied. In Chapter 2, we develop a method to study the content of the exotic hadrons by determining the wave function renormalization constant from lattice simulations, exploiting the dependence of the spectrum on the twisted boundary conditions. Finally, Chapter 3 deals with a novel method to study the multi-channel scattering problem in a finite volume, which is relevant for exotic states. Its key idea is to extract the complex hadron-hadron optical potential, avoiding the difficulties, associated with the solution of the multi-channel Lüscher equation

Partial twisting for scalar mesons

The possibility of imposing partially twisted boundary conditions is investigated for the scalar sector of lattice QCD. According to the commonly shared belief, the presence of quark-antiquark annihilation diagrams in the intermediate state generally hinders the use of the partial twisting. Using effective field theory techniques in a finite volume, and studying the scalar sector of QCD with total isospin I=1, we however demonstrate that partial twisting can still be performed, despite the fact that annihilation diagrams are present. The reason for this are delicate cancellations, which emerge due to the graded symmetry in partially quenched QCD with valence, sea and ghost quarks. The modified Luescher equation in case of partial twisting is given.Comment: 35 pages, 4 figure

The Optical Potential on the Lattice

The extraction of hadron-hadron scattering parameters from lattice data by using the L\"uscher approach becomes increasingly complicated in the presence of inelastic channels. We propose a method for the direct extraction of the complex hadron-hadron optical potential on the lattice, which does not require the use of the multi-channel L\"uscher formalism. Moreover, this method is applicable without modifications if some inelastic channels contain three or more particles.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

Generating functional for mesonic ChPT with virtual photons in a general covariant gauge

The divergent part of the one-loop effective action in Chiral Perturbation Theory with virtual photons has been evaluated in an arbitrary covariant gauge. The differential operator that emerges in the functional determinant is of non-minimal type, for which the standard heat kernel methods are not directly applicable. Both the SU(2) and SU(3) cases have been worked out. A comparison with existing results in the literature is given